Being that you favor The End of Time as a proper send off for the Doctor I don't believe I have to make too much of that statement(but to honor BtG Iwill).

The End of Time was amazing for the raw narrative alone. For once the companions of the Doctor, the people we all more or less use as touching stones as viewers, are not left holding the wrong end of the stick and end up as all his previous companions do. Instead, they are all left happy, successful, and alive. He even goes one step further and ensures they all reintegrate with life without him in a way that allows them to know he'll always be there even though he'll probably never be there for them again as he is as the 10th Doctor. He has for once in all of his journeys kept his friends and companions and loved ones alive through the thickest of all the perils he has faced up until that point. The journey to that point changed him. You saw him go from the goofy over compenstaing shell shocked war survivor that was Christopher Ecclston to the
charming, intelligent, confident, brave man that he always was but the time war nearly broke due to the awful choice it forced upon him.

This makes the very ending all the more heart breaking because he has done so much and has gone through so much in that body that he doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to have to move on like all Timelords must. He wants to stay who he is as his experiences have defined him to be in the form of the 10th Doctor. He had finally come to terms with the fall of his people and he didn't have to be so angry and alone anymore. He was finally moving on and becoming his own person which, of course, makes it all the more tragic and sad when you see him so broken having the barest kind of contact with someone else. The last bit always makes me tear up as he says, "I don't want to go...".

This makes it very hard to compare the 10th and 11th Doctors. They were both very different. The 10th wanted to stay even if he was in pain because he had been through so much even if he had reservations about how much he had seen or at least that is my interpretations of the writing. The 11th on the otherhand having an extra 400 years of time plus adventuring in between and having gone through several tragedies-both immense and miniscule in scope-didn't really face the traumatic emotions of it all. He didn't have to. He was just moving passed them and moving on all throughout his run no matter how awful. He was simply too old to let himself be caught up in it even if he had to face it having gone through so much tragedy and pain in his life throughout the iterations. He would just keep moving on regardless of what it did to himself(Amy telling him he shouldn't travel alone anymore because it nearly made him ready to kill in A Town called Mercy is an example).

I think this character development plus the fast paced adventurous writing of Steve Moffet made the 11th Doctor so devoid of the emotional checks he had previously that when it came time for him to move on it wasn't as dramatic as it could be. He was ready to move on. He understood he had received more regernations and logically he didn't mind. He saw Amy in his last moments one last time and that might have been one of the few things holding him back. He had securely kept another companion so safe that she saved him throughout existence as well in the form of Clara Oswald. So, he was ready. Now I don't mean on the whole he was cold and badly written as a Doctor but if you ever see a true veteran of anything in life...they simply aren't surprised when surprises happen and rapid change desceneds. So, I think this made the finale a little weak but character wise not hard to understand at all. He is simply the 11th Doctor and he didn't mind moving on. He wanted to go.

So, in so many words, I agree. The last ten minutes was pretty phenomenal television.

This is what makes me curious about this new iteration. He could be so brand new with a new line of regernations that he doesn't remember anything anymore hence the question to Clara, "Can you drive this thing?" or he is playing the fool because this new face needs to figure out this technically new companion?

I don't know. I'm still on overload here. I marathoned through the modern series' one after the other this last month and a half and my head hurts.

AVALANCHE Warrior

I preferred the End of Time myself, but Time of the Doctor was amazing. I thought it was a really unique regeneration where he destroyed the Dalek ship, but noooooo. Gotta get those waterworks going before moving on to the 12th doctor. Now to play the waiting game...

Network Boss-man

It depends on region, but on average there's one or two three-to-five part stories (25min per part) for each old Doctor. Old Who is actually fairly hard to come by Amazon instant streaming has a few different ones, too, if you're eligible for that...

It depends. It's hard to say. he misses them, but he had a rough relationship with them in the old series anyway, something that I think a lot of people actually forget. Like, they force him to regenerate once, put him on trial for treason with the threat of execution another time - it's a complicated relationship, one they removed from the 2005 reboot because they thought it complicated things too far. Now people know the show again they can bring them back.

I don't think we'll see them return in full force any time soon, though...

Network Boss-man

Haha! In a sense, yes. There's about 98 of the 800 episodes (1st, 2nd Doctor ones) still missing, lost in time because they were never archived! The other 702 are available generally, but you might have to search a bit...

(Note: Episode here refers to a 25-minute episode, so one 'story' is 4 or 5 of those in most of Classic Who.)

AVALANCHE Warrior

So far i've seen an entire "story" for every classic doctor, thanks to BBC The Doctors Revisited, that was such a treat. I enjoyed the 4th doctor the most, but if I could I probably would of started with the first. I don't have access to my PC so any other means of watching them is pretty much gone right now. I'm sure one day they will become very easy to watch, just gotta wait though.

Yevonite

I just bought the first DVD set for William Hartnell and I plan on buying as much of the classic Who as I can before August. Oddly enough a lot of the classic Who DVD sets on-line are crazily low priced especially the used ones so I might be able to pull this off in only a handful of paychecks.

Network Boss-man

With old Who more than new Who it's probably wise to skip around a bit. There's some great lists of what is worthwhile. A guy on NeoGAF posted a list I very much agree with, which is...

1st Doctor
An Unearthly Child
The Daleks
The Edge of Destruction
The Aztecs
Dalek invasion of Earth
Time Meddler
The War Machines
The Tenth Planet

2nd Doctor
Tomb of the Cybermen
The Ice Warriors
The Enemy of the World
Web of Fear
The Invasion
War Games

3rd Doctor
Spearhead from Space
Inferno
Terror of the Autons
The Daemons
Day of the Daleks (especially the DVD special edition)
Sea Devils
The Three Doctors
Carnival of Monsters
The Green Death
The Time Warrior

4th Doctor
The Ark In Space
Genesis of the Daleks
Terror of the Zygons
Pyramids of Mars
Brain of Morbius
Seeds of Doom
The Deadly Assassin
The Robots of Death
Talons
Horror of Fang Rock
City of Death
5th Doctor
Earthshock
The Five Doctors
Resurrection of the Daleks
Caves of Androzani

6th Doctor
lol

7th Doctor
Remembrance of the Daleks
Curse of Fenric

This stuff is all available on DVD. Some episodes, like The Chase, aren't great on their own, but have some of the best companion exits in the old show. Also not listed are some regeneration/post-regeneration episodes - they're not all good, but you may want to watch them because of their significance.

Yevonite

Man, the first handful of episodes of Who are rather dry and awkward. You can tell even without listening to the commentary and reading up on it that the show was dealing with a lack of budget and suffering from a serious lack of shooting time. Though, having jsut watched the Aztecs I think they finally found the formula for something here. The actor for the Doctor, William Hartnell, whom I sort of just plain didn't like from the get go, is growing on me with every episode. I loved his delivery of that line in the first episode of the Aztecs, "...But you can't re-write history! Not one line!"

I am quite looking forward to seeing the Daleks again. I loved their twisted beginnings on Skaro.